The early modern period witnessed a dramatic increase in the
migration, expulsion and exile of social groups and individuals around
the globe. The physical movements of religious refugees triggered
widespread, ongoing migrations that shaped both the contours of European
colonialist expansion and the construction of regional, national and
religious identities. Human movements (both real and imagined) also
animated material culture; the presence of bodies, buildings, texts,
songs and relics shaped and reshaped the host societies into which
immigrants entered. Following exiles and their diasporic communities
across Europe and the world enables our exploration of a broad range of
social, cultural, linguistic and artistic dynamics, and invites us to
reconsider many of the conceptual frameworks by which we understand
‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’.

This conference invites a sustained, comparative and
interdisciplinary exploration of the phenomenon and cultural
representation of early modern migrations. It also aims to consider how
the transmission and translation of material, textual and cultural
practices create identity and cross-cultural identifications in contexts
animated by the tension between location and dislocation. While often
driven by exclusion and intolerance, the exile/refugee experience also
encouraged emerging forms of toleration, multiculturalism and notions of
cosmopolitanism. In a period in which mobility was a way of life for
many, identifications rooted in location were often tenuously sustained
even as they could be forcibly asserted in cultural representation.